The other day, my daughter, aged three, came rushing into the living room. She was clutching the label from her underwear and was very excited. ‘Look, Daddy!’ she beamed. ‘There’s a lovely story in my pants!’

The ‘lovely story’ was, in fact, a four-inch long, flapping label covered in writing. You may well have noticed the same thing with an item of clothing you’ve bought recently.

Made of a man-made fibre, it tends to make you itch, often leaving a red mark on your skin. Its length means it’s often visible through the fabric. Sometimes there are up to four labels joined together. The answer, usually, is to cut it off.

Up to scratch: Clothes labels are to get longer and wordier

The reason for this unwanted piece of material is the fact that many High Street clothing firms now sell their products to a large number of countries. Thus they use the same label — describing the material and washing instructions in up to ten different languages. So you will get the word ‘cotton’, for example, translated into Slovenian, Italian, Portuguese, Estonian etc.

RELATED ARTICLES

Share this article

Share

That is precisely the case with our daughter’s underwear. Mothercare, where we bought the garment, sells the same product across Europe. If it makes things easier for them, and does not inconvenience customers, who can have any complaint?

But soon it may be impossible to buy a garment without such a label. From next year, it’s likely that almost every item of clothing you buy will contain a label with 23 languages.

Yes, you’ve guessed it. This madness is the brainchild of the European Union. EU Directive number 1007/2011 was quietly passed 18 months ago and is officially due to come into force in 2014.

To give it its full title, the directive is on ‘Textile Fibre Names and Related Labelling and Marking of the Fibre Composition of Textile Products’.

In typical Brussels gobbledegook, it states that ‘the labelling or marking [of clothes] shall be provided in the official language or languages of the Member State on the territory of which the textile products are made available to the consumer, unless the Member State concerned provides otherwise’.

Official languages: Clothing will be labelled in the languages of all EU Member States unless they opt out

In plain English, it means that any product sold in, say, Germany must have labels written in German; any sold in Estonia must be in Estonian; anything sold in Poland must be in Polish, and so on.

Although not due to be introduced for several months, the directive is already having an effect on the British clothing industry. John Miln, chief executive of the clothing industry trade body, the UK Fashion And Textile Association, says the result will be that clothing sold in this country will have labels that identify the fibres in 23 languages.

Mr Miln says: ‘If you’re making 10,000 shirts, it makes no financial sense to keep stopping the production line after every few hundred items to put new labels in.’

In any case, at that stage in production, you may well not know whether this particular shirt is destined for Belgium or Bulgaria.

‘All the companies I have spoken to think this is nuts,’ says Mr Miln. ‘As for customers with smaller garments that fit tightly against the body, a large label is offensive.’

Drapers, the fashion industry newspaper, reports that one wholesaler has been told by retailers that they may not be able to accept deliveries that do not already comply with the regulation.

For under the rules, it will be the retailer who is legally responsible — and some of the clothing being delivered to shops now might still be on shelves in 2014.

Undoubtedly, the new rule is bound to befuddle many customers when confronted by washing instructions for their new jumper which are written in Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German and Swedish.

'Silly': UKIP MEP Roger Helmer asks: 'Where do you stop? in covering all the European languages

Roger Helmer, UKIP MEP for the East Midlands, says: ‘Frequently, in many of these languages the word is virtually the same. But people tend to be terribly defensive about language, and if there’s a one-letter difference in the spelling, they want to know: “Why is it in your language and not my language?”’

In any case, he asks, will the EU stop at 23 languages? Only 300,000 people speak Maltese, which is an official language of the EU, while around 10 million speak Catalan, which is not.‘Where do you stop?’ asks Mr Helmer. ‘The whole thing just becomes silly.’

The MEP first became aware of the issue when he visited a sock factory in his constituency and the owner told him that customers in Germany are already saying they wouldn’t accept any more stock without the new-style labels.

Mr Helmer says: ‘They were faced with the dilemma, and cost, of having to take it apart, attach new labels and repackage it.’

Another firm that imports a well-known brand of shirt from the Far East told Mr Helmer that the directive meant it had to take the shirts apart, attach the new multi-language labels and then sew them back together.

Clearly, the problem is widespread. When I asked more than half a dozen household-name British clothes companies about the problem, not one of them wanted to speak publicly about the new rules. Most declined even to issue an official ‘no comment’.

A spokesman for Marks & Spencer said: ‘Our clothing care labels currently carry advice in 12 languages. We’re now working with our suppliers to assess the implications of the new European legislation and the actions we need to take.’

Not surprisingly, much lobbying is going on to try to get the directive repealed, or for a dispensation that will allow the 23-language labels to be in the form of a peel-off sticker.

The UK Fashion And Textile Association has told the European Commission that it plans to go ahead with stickers unless it hears that they would be unlawful. It has not had a reply.

Meanwhile, John Miln is resigned to the fact that it will soon be almost impossible to sell a woollen jumper without it carrying a label declaring it to be ‘laine’, ‘wolle’, ‘uld’, ‘villa’ and so on. And we clothes buyers will have to be resigned to more unsightly, long labels and more itches on our skin.